Second day at the EMEA Red Hat partner Summit

So time to go back to the keynotes again !

Paul Cormier, eVP of Products and Technolopgies at Red Hat, started with a bit of IT history (’80 locked with Dec and Sun, ’90 locked with Microsoft, ’00 Open Source with Red Hat, ’10 Red Hat Cloud) then we went on explaining the Fedora community and linkage to RHEL, as well as JBoss and RHEV foundations. And Cloud foudation (with Cloud Forms and Open Shift as seen yesterday). I’d have expect a bit more of content on the Cloud aspects at Red Hat and its infrastructure.

Jean Staten Healy of IBM then did its yearly advertising campain again with their now famous 1B$ dedicated to Linux… in 2001 ! Ok, to be fair she also mentioned a lot KVM and the Open Virtualization Alliance whose HP is also a governing member. Of course take it with a grain of salt, as I’m working for a compettor, but I was really not impressed.

St Boniface was the starting part of the next talk of Ron Tolido of Cap Gemini, as an evangelist. OSL evangelism shouldn’t be needed anymore (being concretely in front of customers regularly, believe me this is just plain wrong and still has to happen !!).
Cloud has the same issue for him. His talk is on benchmark and the economics of total open source and the cloud. He was involved in Business Technology Agora sessions, which goal is to understand what business expects from IT. Business want to spend more budget on the higest part of the stack rather than on what he calls the invisible infrastructure which is for him boring (again, that’s probably I’m not a business consultant 😉 as I strongly disagree here again !).
All in all, no more IT engineers are needed and you “just” need to glue FLOSS components to have a great IIT. He was the one who bought the dog from Joel Berman joke on the IT consultant !!

I think it’s really a pity today to have such attitude to bash the guys who make the IT run really. Because at the end of the day, when it’s not working, who do you call ? Your favorite call center (where ever it happens to be ?) or your beloved system engineer (if you still happen to have one around to help you) ?

So I was quite happy to be able to have a pause with the Drum Café afterwards, which allowed us to beat on something at least 😉 Best part of the morning definitely !

We then had a very interesting meeting with Werner Knoblich, Gus Robertson and Robert Eiselt in order to sync up on our joint HP, Intel and Red Hat activities.

Some booth duty was planed for the luch period, before I attended a Lab on cgroups.
This is a technology which was really needed for Linux, when compared to other enterprise Unices. But the way it has been developed and integrated make it very powerful, and one of the most promising, probably after SELinux and IPtables. The ability to control resources used by what ever process is fine grained and gives lots of power to the administrator to avoid abuses, limit consumption, … up to the creation of containers !

I was not able to attend the whole Lab, due to another important snc meeting we had with the
Red Hat Regional managers (Phil Andrews, Franz Meyer, Brian Cornell). Very intereting as well. Then after some booth duty again, we delivered our first session, which was attended by some 30 persons and after that it was time to move on to the sponsor dinner and we had again some more interesting discussions with people from Nimbula and Red Hat which ended up very late during the night.